Marketing in 2018 – Why So Many More Opportunities This Year

Online marketing is continuing to grow year after year. More traditional businesses are beginning to see how they can get more exposure and better spend their marketing dollars. Some traditional businesses like auto repair specialists, hairstylists, and painters had customers long before the internet and have held back when it comes to marketing online. They want to use the marketing methods they’ve always used because they’ve always brought in customers, right?

The shift they are beginning to see is that less and less people are driving around looking for an auto repair shop, hairstylist, or painter. They either search in Google for the best company are around their area, use personal assistants like Siri or Alexa, or go on sites like Angie’s List to find which companies are highly rated. While those traditional businesses can still perform their service they are now competing with other lesser known companies that are more visible to potential customers on search engines and have better online reviews. Traditional companies now have to compete with companies that weren’t their competitors ten years ago.

Criteria’s

So fortunately there is a procedure for ranking higher than your competitors so that you get noticed more than your competitors. After all, who actually looks on the second page of Google’s search results? The keys to success are content, links, and keywords. Content means media, like photos, videos, and articles. Links to your site represent that others have trust in your site, and keywords are how potentially customers will find your site.

Content is king. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. Content is one criteria that Google uses to determine how to rank sites against one another. Google wants to present sites to the users that are trustworthy and relevant. One way to beat your competitor is to have more content, that means more relevant pictures, longer informational articles and more videos. If an article is longer it’s considered more relevant and will rank higher than shorter articles. Typically 500 to 750 words is considered a minimum amount of words for an article.

The next criteria is links. You want as many websites relevant to your site to put your website’s url on their website. When they put your website’s url on their website it’s called a backlink. When a website gives your website a backlink it’s considered a vote of trust. Google considers websites that have more backlinks to have more trust and therefore will present those websites to their users as trusted sources.

The final criteria is keywords. You should be familiar with these. These are the words or phrases you input in a search engine to find what you’re looking for. Because search engine users rarely search the second page of Google it’s important to determine what keywords your website should rank for. Be particular and very focused because there may be lots of competition for the keywords you choose so you have to be able to differentiate your website from everyone else’s.

So here were my thoughts on online marketing. It’s worth the time now to market your business online because things will continually change and the traditional companies won’t survive if they aren’t diversified.